Hey, is there somebody around to accept this award?

Back in the late 1990s, some large Internet association conducted a survey in order to bestow awards in categories like Best Web server and Best Web browser, and one of the categories was Best Web authoring tool.

We didn't find out about this until the organization contacted the Windows team and said, "Hi, we would like to present Microsoft with the award for Best Web authoring tool. Please let us know who the author of Notepad is, so that we can invite them to the award ceremony."

Yup, Notepad won the award for Best Web authoring tool.

The mail went out to the team. "Hey, does anybody remember who wrote Notepad?"

Even a decade ago, the original authorship of Notepad was lost to the mists of time. I think the person who ended up going was the original author of the multi-line edit control, since that's where the guts of Notepad lie.

I have read that with a lathe, you can make any other machine tool (and if it comes to it, you can scale up a lathe from a piece of string and wooden stock, and bootstrap yourself to a metalworking lathe out of increasingly harder materials – something to remember if you are dropped back in time to before the industrial revolution). Who invented the lathe? I dunno; but I am perfectly copacetic to acknowlege Notepad as the lathe of programming.

@oliver: Probably the only other contender was FrontPage. That would make the decision very understandable.

I was editing HTML in emacs html-mode in 1995. I’m pretty sure that was easier than doing it in Notepad. Adobe PageMill was already released on the Mac, and for the non-coder, was much better than either.

Notepad is great for quick viewing and editting of text files, and pretty awful for anything else.

I always preferred the Mac version of Notepad, where the pages were auto-saved when you closed the program and you could type several pages worth of notes.

When I moved to Windows, it always bugged the crap out of me that Notepad bugged me to save the document– Notepads are supposed to auto-save! Text editors ask you to save! (The distinction between the two never existed in the Windows world, I guess, like the distinction between "Return" and "Enter" on the keyboard.)

I suspect that the award was based on size of userbase rather than anything else. Most Windows-based web developers have tried Notepad at least once. The other tools have fragmented mindshare.

This is also why Pizza Pizza keeps getting voted the best pizzeria in Toronto. They have franchise locations everywhere, so everyone’s had Pizza Pizza. Anything better is either not on the ballot, or splitting the vote on the ballot. There’s far better pizza out there, but the customer base for better pizzerias is very fragmented.

Out of curiosity, how can someone be "the current maintainer" of notepad? Wouldn’t that be the easiest job in the world? (Or is his job to fight off the zealots who want notepad to use COM and whatever the new alphabet technologies is?)

Chris L: if Notepad is your web authoring tool, how would you ever get Unix line endings into your file anyway? Unix line endings generally only show up in files that originated on Unix machines, which generally don’t run Notepad.

I’m pretty sure that "notepad" in this context was meant as a journalistic shorthand for "your favorite plain-text editor" — because much of the readership would have no general idea what a plain-text editor *is*. Saying "notepad" is probably the most effective way of getting that concept across to an unsophisticated readership of which the majority has never even heard about vi or Emacs.

The point is not that notepad.exe is better for writing HTML than Emacs — which it isn’t by any reasonable metric — but that *any* plain text editor is preferable (or was, at that time) over a specialized HTML tool that tried to isolate the author from the actual markup.

Notepad’s pretty complex these days, though I remember the fun times when it was a multi-line edit control. You had that oh-so-useful 32kiB limit. I don’t know who fixed it so you can open arbitrarily large files, but that was probably the single best improvement.

Nowadays it does Unicode in practically any encoding, leading to several amusing sentences where the Unicode detector fails to properly identify the text.

And I remember the multitude of websites back then with "Created in notepad" badges (like created in vi, etc.)

Line endings in HTTP are CRLF because they were inherited from the Telnet RFC, which defined a "Network Virtual Terminal" which happened to use CRLF. The telnet client for different systems (Unix, DOS, Mac, IBM mainframe) was requires to translate between their local line-termination conventions and the Network Virtual Terminal.

The 32 kiB limit still lives on in some dark corners of the Notepad code, even though it no longer applies since the edit control was rewritten to support longer text for NT.

Once of the little publicised features of Notepad is that if you open a file that begins ".LOG", it will jump to the end and append a timestamp. However, if the file exceeds 32 kiB, it will jump to teh end and pop up a dialog telling you there is not enough memory to perform this operation (but if you manually insert a timestamp with F5, it works fine). It seems they forgot to removed the warning when they removed the 32 kiB limit.

While Notepad is useful for what it is, it’s pretty much crap for doing "real" programming, IMO. I really have little respect for people who use Notepad to code, since tools make such a difference in productivity. How can someone NOT spend a little bit of energy to try and/or learn a new tool that can make their life so much easier? Boggles me.

Oh, you young fellas, always goin’ on about them “editors.” Back in the old days, we used copy con notepad.c, and if you need to change something, you had to type everything again. We were motivated not to make mistakes in the first place, oh yes!